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Math SE has got a cite button to give citations on homeworks or etc. Can we have it here too?

Do we want a cite button? What are the advantages\disadvantages?

A quote from math stack exchange to answer why do we need cite button under every post by @David E Speyer

I am a big fan of the cite button, because it reminds people that they are supposed to cite things they learned here on math.SE. Citations are the currency of academia -- if I write a good answer here, I want to be able to say five years later that this answer was cited so many times in so many papers. Indeed, I get a little annoyed when I see papers that use ideas they learned on MO or math.SE and don't cite them. I know that math.SE is more oriented towards students than research, but it is also important to teach students that they need to cite where they learned things! If you are allowing your students to use math.SE as a reference, then you should be requiring that they cite it just like any other source they use, and the cite button reminds them of this.

It seems that people are complaining because they have trained their muscle memory on other SE sites, or on this site before the button was there. The easy solution to this is to move the cite button to the far right.

I support moving the cite button to the far right, but keeping it visible on the main post.

In this link you can find out the discussion

Also as I mentioned on below comments once we have cite button it will attract attention of people from universities who are studying electronics therefore we will have academical questions regarding research on electronics.

I believe this will create a kind of a good diversity here. People will see some people asking about their current electronics research and we will both learn more.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ I'll ask around and see \$\endgroup\$
    – Voltage Spike Mod
    Commented Dec 15, 2020 at 14:31
  • \$\begingroup\$ Hey, y'all. This is a site setting that we can change pretty easily but I'd love to see some discussion here about the impact of adding the tool to the site - is this something that's commonly needed? Will a "Cite" button added to every post's menu be confusing to people? Can y'all give examples of times you needed to cite a post here? (@VoltageSpike) \$\endgroup\$
    – Catija Staff
    Commented Jan 8, 2021 at 15:00
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    \$\begingroup\$ why do you need a button to cite something? \$\endgroup\$
    – Scott Seidman
    Commented Jan 10, 2021 at 1:17
  • \$\begingroup\$ @ScottSeidman That button is active on some sites (e.g. also Physics and MathOverflow) to easily cite posts in academic publications. Here is probably less needed and it's certainly not useful for homework. \$\endgroup\$
    – Massimo Ortolano
    Commented Jan 10, 2021 at 14:14
  • \$\begingroup\$ @Scott Siedman If we have a cite button people can cite a post more easily. Also it might be take attention of peope who are from academia too like research assitants etc. So I think it is both beneficial for students and academicians. Our SE will look more academical which will take attention of professors etc. (I think it is something good) \$\endgroup\$
    – Nabla
    Commented Jan 10, 2021 at 16:22
  • \$\begingroup\$ @MassimoOrtolano I can't imagine that anyone (except a naive student) would even consider citing EE.SE in an "academic publication", unless that publication was a sociological analysis of behavior on semi-social media. \$\endgroup\$
    – Elliot Alderson
    Commented Jan 23, 2021 at 22:40
  • \$\begingroup\$ @ElliotAlderson In fact, I'm not advocating the implementation of that button here at all. My comment was just to explain the context in which it was born to Scott. Also on Physics SE I can hardly think of any post worth citing. \$\endgroup\$
    – Massimo Ortolano
    Commented Jan 24, 2021 at 7:18

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Thank you @Nabla for asking this, the community team has reviewed and we've made the change to the site.

The citation tool has been turned on by the team and you can find it below every post as you see in the screenshot below:

enter image description here

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    \$\begingroup\$ Thank you for the feature. I also thank to everyone who at least made a comment and hope that everbody will get used to it. \$\endgroup\$
    – Nabla
    Commented Feb 23, 2021 at 16:18
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    \$\begingroup\$ @Ayo Thanks for the help \$\endgroup\$
    – Voltage Spike Mod
    Commented Feb 25, 2021 at 22:56
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I don't want it.

Math SE is essentially 90% homework, while EE SE would love if those questions went away completely.

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    \$\begingroup\$ I understand your concern but there are still home work questions. At least those can be cited properly. That is why I asked it. Also at least from my side sometimes I need guidance about a homework like how to start and at that time I only want somebody to tell me "go that way" not the full solution. So in short I suppose questions like this deserve a cite button. \$\endgroup\$
    – Nabla
    Commented Jan 9, 2021 at 20:37
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I would like this idea. Before I actually joined the site, I used to browse it when I was still in college and was able to use some answers to understand some things in various assignments. Sometimes I did use some quotes directly in which I linked to the page in question. A cite button would have been useful in that respect, although I do understand the thoughts of @pipe that we don't really want people coming here and asking homework questions then citing those answers.

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The cite button is a good idea

  • There is no disadvantage of having the cite button apart from having one extra button below each post, which almost no one ever notices anyway
  • The cite button is not for homework anymore: Almost no one ever used it for homework anyway. It is useful for being able to cite our excellent-quality questions and answers in publications and other types of reports.
  • Posts on the StackExchange network that are cited based on the BibTeX entry automatically generated when you click on the cite button, get picked up by citation aggregators such as Google Scholar, some time ago Jeff Erickson pointed out that some of his SE posts have had more citations than his journal publications:

enter image description here

  • This was one of the first things we got added when we started the new Matter Modeling Stack Exchange, and you can see more about the Meta discussion we had about it, here.
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